Puratos, an industry leader in innovative food ingredients and services for the bakery, patisserie and chocolate sectors, announced a new partnership with Shiru, a functional ingredient company for the food industry. The goal of the collaboration with Shiru is to find new functional, plant-based ingredients that can bring innovation to bakery, patisserie and chocolate products, while improving sustainability and nutritional values without sacrificing taste. The partnership complements the existing product innovation strategy of Puratos that focuses on bringing disruptive solutions that improve consumers’ health & well-being that underlines the company’s deep-rooted commitment to future generations.

Shiru’s discovery platform Flourish uses bioinformatics and machine learning to search through hundreds of millions of naturally-occurring proteins to identify promising candidates that match a specific desired food function – in this case, for use as ingredient(s) in baked goods. Using precision fermentation and high-throughput screening techniques, Shiru then produces these proteins in their lab and evaluates their performance as ingredients. The end result is an ingredient that can be produced sustainably at scale by Puratos to bring brand-new functionalities or to replace an animal-based product, without sacrificing taste or nutrition.